The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.

A Man and His Sushi Chef

WaPo One photo shows a chubby-cheeked boy with an impish grin. Former classmates at a Swiss boarding school describe a shy student who loved basketball and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Recent reports describe him as overweight and a heavy drinker. Now 26, Kim Jong Un has reportedly been tapped to become the next leader of nuclear-armed North Korea.

The youngest son of authoritarian leader Kim Jong Il, he appears to have led a cloistered life, pulled back home after his Swiss schooldays and kept out of the limelight...

For years, Kim Jong Il's eldest son Jong Nam, 38, was considered the favorite to succeed his father until he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in 2001, reportedly to visit the Disney resort.

Kim considers the middle son, Jong Chol, too effeminate, according to the leader's former sushi chef.

Jong Un, however, is the "spitting image" of his father and the leader's favorite, the chef, who goes by the pen name Kenji Fujimoto, wrote in a 2003 memoir.

I want some remembrances of Kim Jong Chol by his former Swiss-boarding school classmates.

Camerooooooon

David Gergen: The Bridge to Nowhere

Above is my book proposal in its entirety for an unauthorized biography of the great middliator. No publisher should need more than this to finalize the deal and send me off to the breathing death of actually having to write the dreadful thing. The pain of it all only bitterer from knowing that Rolling Stone had an even better title for their profile of Clinton-era Gergen-- All the Presidents' Man.

Of course my title is so '07-'08. Maybe David Gergen: The Bride of Nowhere.

Rome, Germany

"For years, Il Duce has been adjuring his subjects to "like like lions." In Italy, lions customarily live in cages. The Italians are now living like lions."-Janet Flanner, Come Down, Guiseppe (from the Italian section of Janet Flanner's World).

I was reading the same book of Janet's wartime European reporting when I last posted here many months ago (but only a couple inches below). I just finished it. I put books down, start other ones, pick them up again, start a few more. Down and up and down again they go. I finish most at some point. The ones I abandon entirely I give up on fast. Janet's book is much better than most. Janet's books are much better than most. Her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, collected in Janet Flanner's World for the first time, is the best journalism I've ever read. The book she didn't write about those trials would probably have been her greatest and kept her name alive more reliably than her forty years of reporting from Paris for the New Yorker. But let me do my part. Janet Flanner. Janet Flanner. Janet Flanner.

Can We Just Arrest The Whole University, Please

Bunch of students at San Diego State get arrested in a big drug bust. Several were getting their degrees in law enforcement. There is, of course, zero irony in that fact. But there was this:One student allegedly dealing cocaine was a month short of obtaining a master's degree in Homeland Security...

Remembrances of Things Current

The poster in the bus shelter's glass wall for How She Move reminds me that one of the scariest phrases in contemporary popular culture must certainly be "MTV Pictures Presents".

The distribution of anomalous large vertical windows on the bunkerish facade of the new UPenn dorm being built right next to the bus shelter reminds me that simulated randomness is the new symmetry. It's been the new symmetry for fifteen years (or is it twenty-five), so I'm not expecting any gasps for this insight. Like I said, I was reminded.

The Widow Gyllenhaal

Something funny happens midway through The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of her husband's sudden death and the prolonged, serial near-deaths of her daughter. Didion quotes a passage from C. S. Lewis which fills you with the overwhelming conviction as you read it that you should really be holding his book in your hands right now instead of Joan D's:

I think I'm beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense; it comes from the frustration of so many impulses that have become habitual Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit, fitting an arrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them but, now, there's an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once, now so many cul de sacs.--C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The Transvaluation of All Kilos

FromUltimate Fitness, Gina Kolata's pretty good book about the history and science of exercise:

"It's much easier to eat a thousand calories than to burn a thousand calories", Blair says. "An old football coach used to say, 'I have all my assistants running five miles a day, but they eat ten miles a day.'"

Night-Stand Petty Thievery and Loan-Sharking to Cripples: A Christmas Story

This short article about janitors-above-the-law and the permanent crime wave at a VA hospital very near where I live is the most compelling thing I've read in a while. Seems to me to have the Walter Reed Hospital scandals of recent months way beat.

Paging Annie Proulx

Tom Russell, now 48, is a former Nampa resident who lives in Utah. Russell said his encounter with Craig occurred at Bogus Basin in the early 1980s.

Allow me now, at such an opportune moment and from the deepest, falsest part of Bogus Basin, to revise and extend my earlier remarks on Brokeback Mountain. I have now seen long, languid stretches of it on TV (though never the whole thing from beginning to end), and it works much better for me as a TV movie than a multiplex one. Much, much better.

New Leads in Missing Topless Florida Beauty?

On a very badly done (poorly moderated and with even dumber lawyers/cops than usual) Fox News show recapping new developments (of which there are none) in the story of the four year old British girl who disappeared from her parents' vacation villa in Portugal, the child was referred to as a "beauty" several times. After a commercial, attention was turned to the freezing-cold case of the Eisneberg (?) baby who disappeared from her parents' Florida home in the late 90's. This infant girl-child was five months old at the time of her vanishing. She was also referred to (but alas, a mere once) as a "beauty". As she was only an infant and she was in Florida and it was a warm night (the windows were open) I'm guessing she might also have been topless at the time of her abduction (or, you know, whatever). They've only half-read the tabloid style-book over there at Fox.

Misconstrued, Screwed and Tattooed

The Royal Family

In an article about the assassination of an Oakland journalist, the WaPo alludes to the faulty dynastic succession structure of the local bean pie mafia:

Bey died before the trial, triggering a succession crisis on the scale of the patriarch's profligacy: He reportedly fathered 43 children.

Months later, Bey's chosen successor turned up in a shallow grave. The son who then took over was killed in an attempted carjacking in 2005. New leader Yusuf Bey IV, then 19, was arrested that year for vandalizing two neighborhood liquor stores in a vigilante enforcement of Muslim prohibitions on alcohol. A year later, he was charged with trying to drive his BMW over bouncers outside a San Francisco strip club.

...Two of the five people arrested were a woman of 27 and her 26-year-old husband, boxed in by unmarked police cars as they drove on the M6 in Cheshire....One of the doctors, the man arrested on the M6, was said to be a Jordanian-born doctor at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent.

So 26 isn't young anymore? Doctors are incapable of disaffection? Are doctors in the employ of the state ever less than disaffected on any given day? Didn't the resumes of the 9/11 suiciders see and raise that very same horrifying prospect once and for all?

Thankfully, socialized terrorism works about as well as you'd expect:

...It also emerged that only "technical failure" stopped the bombs spreading carnage among late-night revellers.

Mobile phones in the cars were meant to trigger a blast when they were called.

The bombers called the Tiger Tiger car twice, and the other four times, but the bombs failed to detonate.

Like an abyss Narcissus, Australia stares into the depths and sees itself:

Homework and Peppermints

The Strawberry Alarm Clock were not an interesting band, that's a plain fact. Still, there was more going on there then I ever would have suspected, if I'd ever taken even a second to suspect anything at all:

...On their first and most famous single, "Incense and Peppermints", lead vocals were sung by Greg Munford, a 16-year-old friend of the band. The song reached #1 on the Billboard pop singles chart in late 1967. After that success the band added George Bunnell (bass and rhythm guitar) before making their first LP in 1967, also titled Incense and Peppermints. Bunnell would also become their main songwriter. Some early Strawberry Alarm Clock songs were penned by George Bunnell and Steve Bartek (who would much later join Oingo Boingo). Bartek played flute on the debut album, but could not join the band because of school.

...The plot began to unravel in January 2006, when FBI agents received a tip from a retail store that it had duplicated a suspicious video into a DVD that showed '10 young men ... in their early twenties shooting assault weapons at a firing range.'

They were 'calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic, 'Allah Akbar' (God is great),' the charges stated.

Using two paid informants, the FBI kept track of the group through audio recordings allegedly made with the consent of the suspects...

In their honor, my new punk name (it will be my 412th) is Agron Schnorrer.

Kinky-Hearted Ho(nky)'s

Uhm

(ABC News) ...Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

There's a federal database of all Americans (resident-aliens included) on anti-depressants?

Futch, In Name and Nature

SPEARSVILLE, La. (AP) -- Two fifth-graders had sex on a classroom floor while two others fondled each other in the classroom, according to a teacher at Spearsville High School.

Union Parish Superintendent Judy Mabry would say only that the allegations were being investigated; Principal Frank Futch said the incident was not indicative of how the school is run.

First-year teacher Michael Walker, who teaches fifth- through eighth-grade English, said three students were either expelled or sent to an alternative school and two others got detention.

Students at the kindergarten through 12th grade school are unruly, disrespectful and rarely disciplined, Walker said.

"They cuss at the teachers and throw things at them, and nothing is done," Walker said. "There was even one student who grabbed a teacher in the butt and nothing was done. The students run the school."

..."This is one incident and everyone is making a big deal out of it," Futch said. "I never had a teacher complain to me, but I have heard them complain to each other."

Mrs. Drudge

That faggot (joke!) Matt Drudge has barely mentioned his gal (joke!) pal Ann Coulter's CPAC F-bomb (the other F-bomb) and the ensuing ritualistic behavior on all sides by all parties everywhere (myself included). Funny shit that quietesse.

So Many Mysteries, So Few Good Men

From Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series (which, if the others are all this good, I shouldn't have used as so many building blocks in the book towers that guard my kingdom) :

Ezra Pound:...We are up against so many mysteries. There is the problem of benevolence, the point at which benevolence has ceased to be operative. Eliot says they spend their time trying to imagine systems so perfect that nobody will have to be good.

Marianne Moore: ....To me the theater is the most pleasant, in fact my favorite, form of recreation.Interviewer: Do you go often?Marianne Moore: No. Never. Unless someone invites me...

Ezra is an old pal, but Marianne is just a familiar name to me so I looked up her poems. Too obscure for my patience but at least some nice images, plus regular doses of jagged phrases and lovely words

Regina Spektor's songEzra Pound is good. It's obscurity is well within the bounds of my patience, gnomic as it is and tied to a jaunty tune on top of that. My advice to the Dresden Dolls is to raise the neo-cabaret name-check stakes with a song called Marianne Moore.

Music Notes: The Messrs Phillips and The Pisser Crash

Mr. Presley's first recordings were in the Memphis studio of Sam Phillips. The Beatles' first recordings took place in the Liverpool studio of Percy Phillips.

An Amazon listener review of Germicide: The Germs Live at the Whisky (The Germs' first recordings took place on stage in front of an audience) includes this sentence which deserves to be memorialized for its outstanding astuteness:

They sound as if they have practiced, since they are all on the same page, but the beats and tunings are lost (most often by lead singer Bobby Pin, later to be called Darby Crash), so they probably practiced for a week (the first time any of them picked up their instruments) and then took two weeks off before this show.

For this is indeed exactly what this performance sounds like. Band picks up instruments for first time and practices for a week, takes two weeks off then records their first show.

Most songs end with a Darby Crash valley boyish whine along the lines of "FUCK YOU, c'mon up here if you think you can do better." Most songs start that way too. Though one also has Darby asking for his "chord" and the guitarist responding with a strum that yields notes adding up to a "chord" never heard before or since. Truly Darby's chord.

Abandoned Butcher Shop

Solace for the Unfamous (You, and Only You, Know Who You Are)

Beautiful, sober Bill, the world's most muscular and tatooed used-bookstore employee, told me about Rumi a few months back when we were talking about which books were in constant demand. Rumi's assorted titles are among the most sought after. The thirteenth century, boy-loving (one boy anyway--a head-twirling dervish named Shams Tabriz), Islamic poet and spiritual guide is a big name in circles that hold others than me within their circumference. But I'm giving this mystic a chance (as I give them all), and he's winning me over. Somewhat Gibranish and Koran Black (not a bad drag name), Rumi is on the sweeter side of Islam as he unhitches Mohammed's tender buttons. And I'm ok with Gibran as far as I can remember. Rumi's pep talk to the celebunots among us, unfamy trumps infamy and plain-famy by his holy reckoning:

Don't worry if you're not famous;God knows best and hides his servantsLike a treasure, for their securityAnd in places that are little known.Would you put your treasureWhere any fool could discover it?

Two Christmas Thoughts

I didn't know the Dolly Parton song Hard Candy Christmas till a few weeks ago, though it appears to haven come out in the early 9o's. It is brilliant in ever way--title, lyrics, music, performance and production. How could it have missed me for so long?

Skip to the Loop, My Darkling

I'm not a big fan of clothes manufactured to look wrinkled, ripped, faded and beat (though on the right person anything looks good), but I do enjoy the trend of several years now in electronic music of deliberately incorporting the sounds of digital misfirings into new recordings (its predecessor was the trend of recreating analog flaws in a digital setting, preserving vinyl hissing, skipping and popping for a post-vinyl world). The most amusing aspect of it is how the seeming mistakes always draw a listener in as your brain gets tricked into possible-danger mode, sensing as it does something amiss and in need of fixing or fleeing. The genre is called "glitch" and you can listen to a fine example of it here (click on the link Breakbot - chelsea_iNN).

Relativity in Our Time

Time moves slowest when you want someone to know that you are ignoring them but not enough time has built up for this to become obvious. Time virtually stops when you are waiting for that first phonecall, email, text or IM to arrive from the newly ignored one so that you may begin your ignoring in earnest.

Wrong

Dennis Cooper's blog was hacked, hijacked and possibly obliterated some time last week. All traffic to the site is currently being redirected to a search results page for the query "bamboo birch plywood", which is a change from the original redirection, when at least you got kidnapped to a porn directory page. Dennis has a new blog running as of yesterday here, but has gotten no help from Blogger in finding out where his original site went. That site was an awesomely extensive work in progess and, possibly, religion in the making--it had attracted a hardcore of acolytes with whom Cooper communicated assiduously in blog endnotes that were usually more extensive than that day's post. It doesn't appear that this act of literary vandalism has gotten any notice anywhere but on Dennis's newborn replacement blog. So I'll mention it here. I mean, you know, what the fuck, who destroyed the man's work?

Update: Dennis Cooper's blog has been restored at the original address but with severe damage. Blogger quarantined in it in some kind of faulty cryogenic holding tank upon receiving a spate of reports that the site was a spamblog. Blogger's reaction to such reports (and in this case, and probably others, the reports were phony and malicious) appears to be instantaneous and stupid, true faster-than-lightspeed foolishness--believe the reports with no investigation, put a redirect on the address, and trash the blog by incompletely archiving it. I'd love to hear Blogger and Google's defense of their shoddy practices in such circumstances.

This Is Pop

Trolling through the music blogs and dl'ing indiscriminately, of a rainy autumn afternoon and evening, one (and in particular this very one typing) can grow a little music weary from the gorging, but still find time and strength enough to hate terrestrial radio for letting the culture down so terribly these last several decades or so. May its death be sooner than now. But what with satrad (sirius, xm) and netrad (a million djs and a million stations), and blograts ripping their old vinyl and new cd's, something more interesting will start emerging from a plurality of open windows in passing cars within our lifetimes, I am somewhat sure. In the meantime, listen and watch Serge Gainsborough and Jane Birkin's little-girl-got-big, Charlotte, sing a most perfect song, a song about itself, about the people listening to it and about the people making it, The Songs That We Sing. Charlotte is a dabbler, stars in the occasional movie, records an album every twenty years, speaks Enlglish on Thursdays and Saturdays and French the rest of the week, gives birth now and then. The world is her stage, we are all the rest of us prop-masters, light techs and curtain pullers. (I've linked to her her video not directly through youtube but through the page I found it on, Filles Sourires, a music blog all about the sweet sounds French birds make. Even when it's Thursday and they go all anglo in the studio.)

Methics or Out Through the In Door or The Surrationalist Manifesto

There are few human beings with a higher estimate of their own ethical prowess than Canada's gift to southern North America, Mr. David Frum. So I'm thinking David is pretty much coming out in this exercise in contrapuntal relativisionism. Shine on you crazy diamond.

The Real Daily Show

It's not the Viacom clips that make youtube worth it's google billions, or any of the other copyrighted crap that's free on TV anyway. It's all the young dudes stripping for their webcams, from coast to coast to coast and pole to pole, that makes it cheap at any price.

Datnoiz's ouevre gives you a glimpse of the up-in-their-rooms multitude. You should start with Boy Shorts. Or maybe Fuck Song. Datnoiz takes off less than most, but his less is so much more.

The Undersigned

As a child I was delighted by open letters in support or (more typically) decry* of cultural/political this or political/cultural that. I read them most often in the Week in Review section of the Sunday New York Times. I imagine they find there way into print there still, but my weeks have gone unreviewed for many years now so I cant say for sure. Yesterday Andrew Sullivan linked one such letter he had recently added his name to. Upon reading it, and the lengthy list of co-signers, I felt some of the old thrill. I didn't know anything of the controversy it addressed until that very moment, but it seemed a reasonable enough complaint. More reasonable certainly than my own anger at never having been asked to sign it, or anything like it. The roster of co-complainants lacks the star-power of some of the standby names of my youth, there's not a Norman Mailer or Shelley Winters among them. I have to think the entire, barely luminous enterprise would not have been dragged down even one lousy micro-watt by the inclusion of:A. Bender, open letter signatory, West Philadelphia/South Philadelphia

Have it your way, think-tank bitches and tenured stem-winders. I liked these names and ID's though:

Mad love, envy and respect to Mr. John Leone and Ms. Patricia Schramm for letting their names stand alone, with no institutional or occupational apposition. Though I bet each one was a little pisssed the other had stolen their silent thunder.

*No, not a mistake, an innovation, or maybe a mistaken innovation. Usually I let my reformats of the language stand and fall on their own, but this one reads so strangely to some, and I like it so much, that I have to note it. I almost went with decrial, but why make up a new word when there's a perfectly good old word waiting for a new role in the grammar.

Henry James, William James and Jesse James Walk Into a Bar

I Hate Caption Contests

So I'm talking to Foley--I always call him Flafol, you know, for Florida and Foley, just this thing we have--anyway it's at the Capitol right after the State of the Union and we're talking, though it's more like pictionary or I dunno shadow puppets maybe, like I'm Marcel Cousteau or something, than actual talking with all the goddam noise and Laura cackling with the last wives club three feet away, and this page strolls up to him, and I mean strolls, leans in real close and hands Foley a newspaper and some mail. Foley watches the kid as he's leaving, like a cat watching a squirrel on TV, then turns back to me smiles and goes like this, I smiled back cause I think he's saying he took the kid fishing, but now I'm not so sure. You working out, Newt?

UPDATE: Sullivan's entries all sucked. I could pretend that my own didn't have a glorious mistake at its very core (I really thought that was Gingrich), but I won't. It still works though (Bush thought he was talking to Gingrish too, see?), but now it's so layered and deep it needs captions of its own.

Fearless Audience Slayer

I believe the considerable thrills in this video come as much from the reaction to the kid's skills as the skills themselves. Showstopping, crowdowning, is one of the primal urges. And he underdogs it too, with his look, manner and initial moves (but you know it's not calculated). Such a rare and potent mix.

The Scaffold Critic

Looks like Hollywoodland has cooked up another self-referential, mytho-prosaical blockbuster.

I was talking to my friend Biz:

Biz (2:24:59 AM): okay well me jeet and some people went to see hollywoodland last night and the movies was so boring .. he wasn't sitting next to me at first, but we were the only ones in the theater so he went over to the corner to smoke a cigarette and climb on the scaffolding behind the screen and when he was finished he came back and sat next to me and the movie was so boring i just thought about him the whole time and got kinda excited .. yea i just realized how horrible a story that was

Me(2:25:37 AM): u were the ONLY ones in the theater?

Me(2:25:51 AM): thats a great story actually

Biz(2:26:04 AM): ohhh no !! there was this lady but she was slumped down in her seat and we didn't know she was there

Biz(2:26:21 AM): and when jeet started climbing behind the screen she said she would tell the movie people if he didn't stop

Odd Lede Verb-Choice In Our Time

Today's strange verb, renew:STOCKHOLM, Sept. 17 — Sweden appeared set to sweep away 12 years of center-left government today, voting to reject its longtime prime minister, Goran Persson, in favor of a conservative candidate who has pledged to renew the Swedish welfare state.

The NYT's Stockholm bureau is a little startled by the Swedish election results. The apparent winner is a mildish conservative reformer, which suggests a verb that would bring some sense to the lede-- a conservative candidate who has pledged to reform the Swedish welfare state. But their fingers just couldn't key in that word or that thought, so renew it was.

The Wet Locker Room Floors of France

The Daybed Critic

Fifty years ago I wrote here about the best New York City movies ever made. At that time I counted them as Rear Window, Dead End and Rosemary's Baby, with Rosemary taking the palme d'or. I will now add two other movies I've seen recently. Maybe my critical faculties have gone to Icelandic hell and I'm grading like a Ivy League professor now, but they both seemed very good to me at the time (and the time for both was somewhere around four in the morning).

Our new inductees: Birth, a movie that mirrors Rosemary in several ways, most notably that Nicole Kidman imports Mia Farrows earlier performance (and haircut) into this this 2004 movie. Lauren Bacall's final line in the film is staggeringly funny (possible disclaimer: remember, this was around 4 am) and recasts the whole cinematic exercise as a super-stylish shaggy dog story. Can there be higher praise than that? There is nothing staggeringly funny in Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it is an excellent movie if you ignore the jokes, which there are, thankfully, not many of. Strangely, with this film's addition to my list, Mia Farrow appears in two of the five greatest New York City movies, and she is reprised in a third.

Sexed U Up

I believe it is a settled point of the American language, settled through hugger-mugger plebiscite of 30,000,000 nimble-fingered yankee teenagers, that the past tense of the verbal "text" is "text". We might be able to bring this anomaly in line with standard grammatical practice by commanding that the past tense of "text" be written as "texed". The force of this command might prove wanting, however.

Feschrift in Honor of the English Language

The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.

Every word out of the man's mouth is a stark reminder.

The President didn't say Islamic Fascists so much as Islamic Faschistissses. If a native-grown fascist movement should spring up in Massachussets any time in the near future, we can look forward to even more intricate sibalant riffing by the big bebopper.

Che's House Lands on Fidel, Raul Gets the Ruby Slippers

Clinton is so promiscuous that Raul Castro must be gay.

The likely as not ghostwritten prologue:As a result of the enormous effort [I] made to visit the Argentine city of Cordoba to participate in the reunion of Mercosur, in the closing ceremony of the Summit of the Peoples at the historic University of Cordoba, and in the visit to Altagracia, the city where Che spent his childhood, and, along with all this, to attend immediately the commemoration of the 53rd anniversary of the assault on the barracks at Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Cespedes on July 26, 1953, in the provinces of Granma and Holguin, days and nights of continuous work, barely able to sleep, my health, which has withstood all trials, was subjected to extreme stress and broke down.

This provoked an acute intestinal crisis, with sustained bleeding, that obliged me to face a complicated surgical operation. All details of this health accident are evident in the X-rays, endoscopies, and filmed materials. The operation obliges me to spend several weeks in repose, away from my responsibilities and duties.

The particulars of Fidel's revolutionary bequest:

1. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba upon the Second Secretary, comrade Raul Castro Ruz.

2. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as Commander in Chief of the Heroic Revolutionary Armed Forces upon the aforementioned comrade, Army Gen. Raul Castro Ruz.

3. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as President of the Council of State and Government of the Republic of Cuba on the First Vice President, comrade Raul Castro Ruz.

4. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as principal promoter of the national and international program of public health upon the member of the Political Bureau and Minister of Public Health, comrade Jose Ramon Balaguer Cabrera.

5. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as principal promoter of the national and international program of education upon comrades Jose Ramon Machado Ventura and Esteban Lazo Hernandez, members of the Political Bureau.

6. I delegate, on a provisional basis, my functions as principal promoter of the national program of the energy revolution in Cuba, and cooperation with other countries on this field, upon comrade Carlos Lage Davila, member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers.

If I was Raul I'd be like, "Oh, so I'm only half the bad hombre you are, you intestinal bleeder, you brokeback tourista, you death's-door reposeur. Commandante used to hold out in mountain fastnesses, and now his mountainess fatassness can't withstand a long weekend of chauffered sightseeing and catered attitudenizing. I'm good enough to run the counry, the party and the army but not your mumbo jumbo energy revolution. Old scraggle-puss is the only Castro Ruz who gets to play doctor, teacher and scientist too. "Provisional basis" my sweet ass, you provisional deadman."

If Gertrude Stein Wrote Yahoo's Headlines for Yahoos as Gertrude Stein

The Eastern Edge of Downtown

The 81-year-old father of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman was cited for lewd conduct and indecent exposure Tuesday for allegedly having sex in a vehicle with a 38-year-old woman, according to a police report.

Police responded to a call early Tuesday evening and arrested Norman Bertram Coleman Sr. and the woman, Patrizia Marie Schrag of St. Paul, outside a pizza restaurant on the eastern edge of downtown St. Paul.

...Sen. Coleman, R-Minn., issued a statement Wednesday that said:

"I love my father dearly. I do not condone his actions or behavior, and I am deeply disturbed by what I have learned. He clearly has some issues that need to be dealt with, and I will encourage him to seek the necessary help."

Drudge In Heat

Drudge featured a link (with pix) to the News of the World's squalid expose of a recent George Michael sexual escapade in Hampstead Heath. Surely this qualifies (more than qualifies--recommends) Drudge for the same kind of treatment. Pursuit and capture (on film and in quotes) of Drudge in the throes of whatever passion he's inclined to. Pity the passion.

I hope the leftoid blogosphere takes up the chase, though the chase might come to consist of tailing Drudge while he drives in slow, jerking circles around Ann Coulter's warren. What a silly, slimey bitch Drudge is.

Mirror Berlin

I see that spellbinding phrase almost every day. Rapidshare, the euro-colossus of twilight-market file sharing, most often directs my computer to retrieve various romantic art movies of my desiring from Mirror Berlin.

Gloom, Doom, Rheum

I read a book by Leonard Michaels a long time ago that took its title from Henry James's closing thought upon recounting the details of a public hanging he'd witnessed, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.

Mr. Jonathan Swift offers all of us another possible title for our own volumes of collected shorter fiction:

WHEN my Muse officious venturesOn the Nation's Representers;Teaching by what Golden RulesInto Knaves they turn their Fools:How the Helm is rul'd by WalpoleAt whose Oars, like Slaves, they all pull:

Let the Vessel split on Shelves,With the Freight enrich themselves:Safe within my little Wherry,All their Madness makes me merry:Like the Watermen of ThamesI row by, and call them Names.Like the ever-laughing Sage,In a Jest I spend my Rage:(Tho' it must be understood,I would hang them if I cou'd:)

If Paul Harvey Was Gay and Really Concise

We Are the Gambians

Popbitch, the British music gossipist, had a group of blind items pertaining to the disreputable activities of various WAGS. Such as:

A tabloid has photos of which WAG snorting cocaine off the tip of her ex-boyfriend's penis? They've told her they won't publish if she gives them exclusive access and stories.

There was a strong (and slow) whiff of soccer to the items, but I couldn't figure out (or recall) what a WAG was. So I asked the acronym finder, and among its results I saw my answer, oddly stated though it was:

WAG Wives and Girlfriends (of the English Football team)

I was a girlfriend of the English Fotball team once. But never a wife. The closest I ever got legal-relation-wise was maybe an uncle.

I enjoyed the the complete list of WAGS. It's the world in a grain of sand, the cosmos in a cup of tea. It's the motor vehicles department in Banjul. But isn't everything?

Limbaugh's Hardon for Clinton

Rush "Poppers" Limbaugh tells a joke which demonstrates the truism that we often hate those we really want to be:

Limbaugh joked about the search on his radio show Tuesday, saying Customs officials didn’t believe him when he said he got the pills at the Clinton Library and he was told they were blue M&Ms. He later added, chuckling: “I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.”

If wishes were fishes, that would be an imaginary, talking (and lying) one. And who here believes Rush doesn't know a real M&M when he sees one, could sniff out a fake from across the room and through a closed door?

There's no mention of Limbaugh's curious vacation and excess-baggage return over at the Corner. Which silence they could maybe play off as conservativish decorum regarding failings in the private sphere. Except that they only seem to get decorous when it comes to other mod cons falling down. And the Clinton line above would revoke that politesse, even if it were real and ever present, by reason of its very public, and quite insane, self-justification/obfuscation. It's the rhetorical/jocular/logical/ethical equivalent of Roy Cohn yelling "queer" in a crowded gaybar.

Blogcritics grabs headline of the day with their entry (if only they'd stopped with the headline):

Yale Is Latin For Gay

The American Movie Musical: Its Rebirth and Redeath

Most remarkable cinema dancing in fifty years or so (the stick toss alone would be worth nine dollars at the AMC, and be the only thing worth nine dollars there). Most remarkable natural lighting in the history of film making, period. The downtown carriage ride in the Magnificent Ambersons is a distant second.

Dinfinity and Reyond

I really recommend the online radio built into the new version of AIM, the majestically meaninglessly named Triton. I haven't gotten any farther than the DJ Sets station, but I'm happy to stay where I am. Tonight they're cycling through a very good collection of sets by various DJ's called "Live from the Getty Center", excellent chilly beats and lazily danceable bleeps and skitters. It was while looking for more info on one the Getty set DJ's, John Tejada, that I discovered the most auspicious Music Map site. Mr. Tejada's map is sparer than most, but it will get you started on your journey through the land of maps--even greater than a map of Lapland is the lap of Mapland. Each map recapitulates the big bang as the initial universe-begetting hyper mass explodes, flinging the universal matter to all bright and dim corners of space. You'll see what I mean. And If you don't like this musical constellation, all the simfinite parallel miniverses are awaiting your godly touch to burst into being. And song.

He Seems Awake Inside to Me

This may the greatest boy-lipsyncing-into-pc-cam video ever. But I've thought that about approximately four-hundred and seventeen other incarnations of this most modern, and aesthetically pure, art form. Who cares that revolution won't be televised when it's already playing on youtube.

Our hero here is lyrically shaky sometimes (then again he's trying to do overlapping vocal parts), but when he grabs the cam for his psych-out, he produces the p.o.v. shit outta the thing. And his spoken coda is even ballsier.

If I'd had a pc cam when I was 14, if there'd been such a thing as a pc cam when I was 14, or 28 for that matter, I would have made a hundred of these vids. The world has a right to feel robbed.

The Excess of Your Presence Is Requested

I'm reading a biography of Pasolini. When I'm finished, Pier Paolo will be the first (and I predict only) person I will have read two bios of. I'm not quite sure why him, except for my fascination with his death (so you see, I am sure).

I only know one of his novels, The Ragazzi, which does have an ending of grim genius, its final scene is the most pathetic thing, banally narrated, I've ever read. Buy it and see, even with my head's up, if Paolo's sucker punch doesn't take you down.

I've watched half the movies and didn't like any of them much, except for the Decameron. And maybe the Arabian Nights as soft porn. Pigsty and Salo are masterpieces of sustained others-loathing and gigantically perverse artifacts of franco-italo co-productivity, so if you're in the market for that, you'll want to add them to your shopping cart. I don't know the poetry except for a few stray encounters. And the political/cultural journalism not at all.

The book I'm reading now is much better than the one I read many years ago. It especially makes me want to find a volume each of triple P's pomes and openyawns. I liked the poetic fragment the biographer invoked to set the stage for that final night's miserable adventure:

In reality, I'm the boy,they're the adults. I who by the excess of my presence

have never crossed the border between lovefor life and life...I gloomy with love, and all around me the chorus

of the happy for whom reality's a friend.

I copied it exactly, don't ask me to explain the layout or the ellipsis. I could point out some of the landmarks on the border between love for life and life, though.

Important Props in American History

I use my influence very sparingly now, as it is so mighty. But others recognize my dormant powers and put me on their email lists. Just today Christy Setzer of Senatemajority.com informed a select few thousand of us about Sen. James Inhofe's family-braggin' moment in the semi-annual marriage amendment re-debate, de-rebate. I pass it along to those of you not so connected as myself:

During today's same-sex marriage amendment debate, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) used a prop of a blown-up photo of his family (some 20 people or so). Gesturing towards the photo, he said:

{14:24:36} (MR. INHOFE) (NOT AN OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT }AS YOU SEE HERE, AND I THINK THIS IS MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT PROP WE'LL HAVE DURING THE ENTIRE DEBATE, MY WIFE AND I HAVE BEEN MARRIED 47 YEARS. WE HAVE 20 KIDS AND GRANDKIDS. I'M REALLY PROUD TO SAY THAT IN THE RECORDED HISTORY OF OUR FAMILY, WE'VE NEVER HAD A DIVORCE OR ANY KIND OF A HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.

The operative word here is "recorded". The Senator is, I'm sure, familiar with the concept of "off the record". That's where all the really interesting stuff happens and gets said. According to Skinny Jim's official bio:

Inhofe and his wife, Kay, are members of the First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa and have been married for 46 years. They have four grown children and twelve grandchildren.

So discounting the patri and matri-archs there are sixteen chances that at least one of the lesser Inhofes got a little not-fit-for-the-flyleaf-of-the-family-bible action somewhere along the line. Given the numbers and the locale let me go on the record and point to another important prop, a home-baked statistical pie chart and accompanying two color graph proving, to my own complete and utter satisfaction, there ain't no possible way Tulsa has let us down in this regard. I will further attest and affirm there ain't no way the First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa has let us down either. It would so violate the odds of god, man and powerpoint.

To the Dogwood Prince: A Poem in Chat

u are a quitterpure and simpleif dr moreau had that aint-gonna-happen attitudethen things wouldn't have gone so horribly wrongsure, malign a great man for his small mistakestypical phoenixville spitei hope u grow a tail and snoutand furry tongue and pincers

oh, i forgot to tell you when i was like 4 or 5,i was the dogwood princedude u fukn lie that is so perfect

i thought you'd like that i have the crown still omg ur like pagan royaltyi mean omp, oh my pan how u get picked? the other boys have to die?they like post the pictures whoever gets the most votes -a penny equals one vote - wins

ur ma pimped u out in other wordsi prefer to think i was the handsomest of the bunch prefer away quasimodohahaha asshole

Oh, my penny-a-vote dogwood prince I kiss ur leavesur branchesur trunkur rootsand u are on for that movieif they are ever wise enough to make itClueless Vs Mean Girls: The Final Shopping Spree

The Non-Herd Music

Christopher Hitchens cited Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20 as equal in laughter stature to Evelyn Waugh's routinely proclaimed Scoop and Michael Frayn's invisibly unproclaimed The Tin Men in a December 2005 Guardian piece on the greatest comic explorations of the British press (the Guardian is, by the way, refracted into the Custodian in the Amis book). I was with the timeless herd in my appreciation of Waugh's book, but I thought Frayn's masterpiece was pretty much written for my eyes only, never having seen even a passing mention of it in the many years since I first discovered its vast (which is to say microscopic) absurdity on my own. I have now read Mr. Amis's book. Mr. Hitchens is correct. It deserves to stand with the others. How the British press, and the media generally, has withstood these three books' very existence I cannot say.

Your Jeweled Axles Gleaming in the Sun

Three selections from Translations From the Chinese by Arthur Waley (copyright 1919 and 1941)

from The Great Summons(fourth century B.C.)

...A summer-house with spacious rooms And a high hall with beams stained red; A little closet in the southern wing Reached by a private stair. And round the house a covered way should run Where horses might be trained. And sometimes riding, sometimes going afoot You shall explore, O Soul, the parks of spring; Your jewelled axles gleaming in the sun And yoke inlaid with gold; Or amid orchises and sandal-trees Shall walk in the dark woods. O Soul come back and live for these delights!

from Woman (third century A.D.)

How sad it is to be a woman!Nothing on earth is held so cheap.Boys stand leaning at the doorLIke Gods fallen out of Heaven...

The Scholar in the Narrow Street (third century A.D.)

Flap, flap, the captive bird in the cage Beating its wings against the four corners. Depressed, depressed the scholar in the narrow street: Clasping a shadow, he dwells in an empty house. When he goes out, there is nowhere for him to go: Bushes and brambles block up his path. He composes a memorial, but it is rejected and unread, He is left stranded, like a fish in a dry pond. Without it - he has not a single farthing of salary: Within - there is not a peck of grain in his larder. His relations upbraid him for his lack of success: His friends and callers daily decrease in number. Su Ch'in used to go preaching in the North And Li Ssu sent a memorandum to the West. I once hoped to pluck the fruits of life: But now alas, they are all withered and dry. Though one drinks at a river, one cannot drink more than a bellyful; Enough is good, but there is no use in satiety. The bird in a forest can perch but on one bough, And this should be the wise man's pattern.

Harlot's Goss

I was a hospitality suite hooker for my country. My company, I mean. Same dif. It was great. Dusty Foggo, don't go! Or at least wake me up before you go-go. He would blow up in my face (dusty it wasn't) and now it's blowing up in his face.

And Randy "Duke" Cunningham, I will always treasure those earmarks. On my pillow. And on my back.

...But for Gnostics, a small branch of Christianity, that so-called revelation was just a confirmation of a long-held belief that there was more to Judas and the crucifixion story than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John suggest.

"Gnostics were inclined in this direction for a long, long time," said Bishop Stephan Hoeller, of the Gnostic Society, who also leads a congregation in Los Angeles. The society was founded in 1923, he said, and the church, Ecclesia Gnostica, was started in 1956.

...In Gnosticism, some oral histories have portrayed Judas in a positive light, said Tau Malachi, a Gnostic bishop in Northern California. Malachi said he practices within the Sophian tradition, which dates from the mid-18th century and is rooted in Jewish mysticism.

Michael Berens, Found Satirist

I'm knee deep in the last volume of Bruce Wagner's cellphone trilogy, Still Holding, so I'm already fairly maxed-out on Hollywoodinaneiana, but a throwaway mention of Charlie Sheen's new kidswear line in a news story about Sheen's reaction's to Denise Richards' brutal court filing tanatlized me like few things ever have. And the more I learned the less I was able to believe. This is life imitating farce. This is life eviscerating farce:

Transamerica

(Washington)...In recent months, McClellan had told people he enjoyed his job and wanted to stay for the long term. He said Wednesday he started to think about leaving in the past few weeks and concluded, with a new chief of staff, that it was a good time to go. He and Bush came to a decision in a meeting Monday in the Oval Office.

"I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all, sir, and I will continue to do so as we transition to a new press secretary," McClellan said.

"It's going to be hard to replace Scott," Bush said. "But, nevertheless, he's made the decision and I accept it. ... Job well done."

Bush patted McClellan on the back and they walked together across the South Lawn to the president's helicopter to begin a trip to Alabama. But the aircraft couldn't get off the ground because its radio failed, and they had to take a motorcade.

Heroes of Decorumclasty

Without betraying any confidences (I believe and hope), I can relate that the parents of a twenty-five year old son left his suicide note on display for the assembled mourners to read at his funeral service last week. I didn't know the young man, he was the older brother of one of the best friends of one of my best friends (I don't even know the friend once-removed). The parents' main motivation appears to have been to instruct their son's peers that the financial ruin (by way of gambling) their son found himself in, and which he took to be so shameful and insurmountable that he told no one about it, could have been surmounted and the shame lived through if he'd only come to them and asked for their help.

I've been wondering at the grace and daring of these parents for a week, just admiring their honesty and their brave invention in every spare moment.

In French and Russian Bistros

...And beware of anyone who pulls out the power card to say something like, "I could buy this place and fire you," or "I know the owner and I could have you fired." Those who say such things have revealed more about their character than about their wealth and power.

Whoever came up with the waiter observation "is bang spot on," says BMW North America President Tom Purves, a native of Scotland, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, who lives in New York City with his Norwegian wife, Hilde, and works for a German company. That makes him qualified to speak on different cultures, and he says the waiter theory is true everywhere.

The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.

Peter Kropotkin came up with it too. Somewhere in the anarchist prince's works he mentions that the how-they-treat-the-waiter rule was always good for picking out the police informants (and agent provocateurs) from among your fellow revolutionists. I always took it as night time rule though, and I can attest it's served me well in my moonlit dining and plotting against the empire. I see now I must also remember it for daytime brunch, lunch and cocktail dates--those sunlit headhunting expeditions for talent to run my counter-empire.

Escapee From 300 Film Scripts, And Or the Future, Apprehended on White House Lawn

WASHINGTON - A screaming intruder made it onto the front lawn of the White House Sunday while President Bush was at home before being apprehended by Secret Service officers.

...The bearded man, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt that said "God Bless America," jumped the fence outside the White House and ran across the north lawn while repeatedly yelling, "I am a victim of terrorism!"

..."I have intelligence information for the president," he said, waving his arms in the air. "I'm not afraid of you," Patterson screamed at the officers who were ordering him to the ground with guns drawn.

JuneJuneJune: Mark of the Beast

At first I thought this was a typo, an understandable (on so many levels) conflation of S Club 7 and 9/11. But apparently it is an intentional re-branding of the event with the S a super-abbreviation of that super September of recent memory.

Anti-similarly, I am now referring to the holiday of American independence as the 4th of Seven.

...Just before the 2000 Republican National Convention, he told a Washington Post reporter that it made perfect sense to shuttle lawmakers to a five-car hospitality train from Philadelphia's First Union Center. "The whole purpose of this is to treat members of Congress as kings and queens," he said.

...Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a member of the Judiciary Committee who opposed Clinton's impeachment, said yesterday that Rudy's guilty plea shows "the hypocrisy" of Republicans who were eager to take down a Democratic president.

"How did Abramoff and Rudy meet, through JDate? No, they met through DeLay," Frank said.

Gay.com: 2025

Barricade Selectivity

I've read many references to the French college students' union in the past week but not till today had I heard of this:

The head of the French secondary school union FIDL, Tristan Rouquier, said Monday that more than 450 secondary schools were currently disrupted because of the protest, 'with blockages, selective barricades or occupations.'

Where are the grade school trade unionists and the kindergarten syndicalists, the tadpoletariat? Go ahead sophisticated kiddies, sit this one out. Laugh all you want at your lycee and university older brother and sisters blockading and occupying to defend their lifetime right to the jobs that the French economy isn't creating for them in the first place. "If it wasn't for occupations they wouldn't have any occupations at all", I can almost hear you stage whispering in your jaded but squeaky way. It is sooooooooooo easy to be satirical when you're too short to get on half the rides at Euro Disney.

Paul Haggis Is the Sam Mendes of His Generation

The joke template for this headline courtesy of a childhood acquaintance of mine who later set himself on fire in a vacant lot (RIP, B.B.). The indisputable stature of Paul Haggis was called to mind by Drudge's link to this.

I Accommodate Islam

It was a great parking spot, but there at the interstices of civilizations I reminded myself of an important rule for my time and space, a rule that unknown others before me also remembered last night (my ancestors of some several hours), a rule that most probably created that excellent curbside emptiness: Don't park next to the mosque on Thursday evening.

Slobodanny, We Largely Knew You

Putting the Ville Back in Nashville

Frank Zafka

My typos are genius, my misreadings are hyper-genius (see title above). All the very few google hits for Frank Zafka are keyboard misfirings by one-off hacks. Except, soon, for mine. I offer it freely to any LA/Prague art scenester looking for a strong hook and a fast foot in the door. A strong, fast hookfoot. I'm also making the subtler and slower Franz Kappa available for anyone who prefers burrowing their way in.